


'Til the Blue Skies Drive the Dark Clouds Far Away

by AMarguerite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Race Changes, Alternate Universe - World War II, Gen, Gender or Sex Swap, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-23 23:33:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6133909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/pseuds/AMarguerite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on some sketches by SimplyIrenic of Enjolras as a female Resistance leader. After being shot down over Calais in the Battle for Britain, Polish pilot Feuilly is rescued by a Resistance cell lead by Enjolras, a modern day Joan of Arc.</p>
            </blockquote>





	'Til the Blue Skies Drive the Dark Clouds Far Away

**Author's Note:**

  * For [simplyirenic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyirenic/gifts).



“Feuilly here has had ten hours of solo training, and absolutely no firearms training whatever, so he’s ready to go up, Bim,” said the improbably named Haybag.

Bim, a short, good-looking man in lieutenant's pips, raised a dark eyebrow. But, as it turned out, he was not as concerned with Feuilly’s lack of formal training, but the nickname they had given him. He answered in rather more fluent French than Haybag’s, though with the same, round, public school vowels, “Feuilly? How’d you reckon that one?”

“He’s one of the Polish pilots,” said Haybag, “but we can’t pronounce his last name. We looked it up in the dictionary and it means ‘leaf.’ But we’ve got a ‘Leafy.’”

“And he only speaks Polish and French,” pipped up someone who had actually insisted his name was ‘Sticks.’ “So Butch said ‘leaf’ in French is ‘feuille’ so we’re calling him ‘Feuilly.”

“Welcome to the squadron, Feuilly,” said Bim, clasping him on the shoulder.

He decided to accept that his name was now Feuilly. It was a bit like a baptism. Here was a new family. Admittedly, one with a distressingly high death rate and rather better educations than himself, but a family none the less. He had never had a family before.

“Flown any, Feuilly?” asked Bim, arranging himself with conspicuous elegance on a divan. With the patterned silk scarf tucked into the open collar of his shirt, he looked like a Victorian dandy, idly entertaining afternoon callers.

“I was a plane mechanic in Warsaw,” said Feuilly, perching uneasily on the edge of a chair. “When we evacuated to France our pilot was... well. I’d studied flying some. More than the rest of the crew. I flew the plane out. And then again to England, after Dunkirk.”

“Do they teach aviation at university in Poland?”

“Ah, no. I mean-- on my own.”

Bim raised an eyebrow the same way the elderly British women who staffed the canteen raised their smallest fingers while drinking tea. It was polite, but intimidating in its class. “Well, you spent your time at university as I did, I’m sure. Cambridge was a lovely succession of parties. Wine, wo-- well not women--but _certainly_ song.”

Feuilly said, awkwardly, “I, ah. I’m not sure. I never went to university.”

The silence that then ensued only served to emphasize the gap between them. He’d had to admit it to the other pilots, too, who quizzed him as if he were one of their own, but had only driven home that he wasn’t. No family, no ancestral home, no university, and now, no country-- not that he’d ever technically had a country to begin with. Jews were sometimes allowed to be citizens, but not often, and not in ways that had much effect on their daily lives. He had only been consistently acknowledged as Polish when there was no longer a Poland.

The blare of the air raid siren shattered into his ear drums. Bim sprang off the divan. “Hurricane or Spitfire, Feuilly?”

“Spitfire.”

Bim seized his flight gear. “To my left, then. If you hear ‘Red 2,’ wait for me to translate.”

“Take your Mae West,” said Leafy, as if this was a sensible sort of thing to say. Someone shoved a life vest at him, someone else a parachute. This at least was familiar. Feuilly pulled his gear on as he ran with the others, streaming away from the sirens towards their planes. Bim was beside him, fumbling with a paper packet.

“Be a good boy and swallow your medicine,” said Bim, holding out one of the tablets.

“What is it?”

“Benzedrine,” said Bim. “We don’t land until Jerry’s back in France, my dear. At least, not on purpose.”

Feuilly swallowed the pill. It stuck in his throat and he pretended this was the reason why he was hovering by the blocks, instead of the ingrained impulse to pull them away for the pilot to take off.

Bim to his right was already leaping agilely in; Leafy to his right was hooking into harness. Feuilly scrambled up and in. In his ear the Squadron Leader, he of the most improbable nickname, Squeak, was speaking in rapid, choppy English-- the whine of the propellers were so much louder from behind than outside-- a crackle of static, then, “Red 2!”

This was his other nickname, he’d discovered. He deployed one of his three sentences of English: “Yes, Squadron Leader?”

An unintelligible English sentence came through.

“Repeat please,” said Feuilly, using his second.

Bim’s voice came into Feuilly’s ear, bright and incomprehensible at first. “-- in French, no? Feuilly, my dear, did you get any of that?”

“Repeat please,” said Feuilly, hooking into harness.

“Stick close to me when we break off into the dogfights. Bail out over land if you can; there are Resistance cells all over this part of France. And listen carefully.”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

“Should you find yourself in trouble, give your name, rank and serial number. If someone asks if you are a friend or foe, say you are a friend of the ABC. Tap it out in Morse if you have to, but say A.B.C. What do you say, sweetie?”

“ABC,” said Feuilly. He tried to keep his voice and his hands steady, but the thrum of the engines and the propellers was jittering through his blood. He wasn’t yet used to benzedrine, he thought, trying to recall which toggles he’d already flipped. The other pilots lived on the tabs, they knew how to turn this jittering energy into proper action.

“And what’s the question they should ask?”

“Friend or foe.”

“And you say?”

“I’m a friend of the ABC.”

 

***

Feuilly felt that, by all rights, he ought to be unconscious, or dead. For several, breathless minutes, as he fell through the sky like a rebelling angel, he did not remember how to deploy his parachute. He had thought, very clearly, ‘I have embraced the world and now it rushes up to embrace me.’ In the end, he’d found the proper tab to pull, and his parachute had embraced a ledge of a tall building, somewhere in Calais.  

The sky over Calais seemed to have shattered into fragments; high whistling bombs and the crescendoing sound of plane propellers, indistinguishable staccato flashes of light. Feuilly dangled in unexpected limbo, heaven shattered above, naught but the abyss below. Time had lost meaning; there was only these brief pause in his endless fall. Feuilly had wrenched his shoulder trying to get out of his harness. He felt wincingly at it, and then the strained, twisting strings of his parachute. They were close to snapping. It looked like this would be a briefer pause than he would have liked. The living darkness of the bombed out city below reached up with smoky fingers.

“When the stars threw down their spears,” came a voice from somewhere beneath him, in French, “and watered heaven with their tears, did he smile his work to see? Did he who make the lamb make thee?”

Feuilly moved his goggles up to his forehead, but his eyes were still dazzled from gunfire. “Hallo?”

“Hallo,” came the voice again.

“Do you speak Polish?” Feuilly asked hopefully, in the same language.

“French, English, German, Latin, and Greek, but alas, not Polish,” came the voice. “Who are you, friend or foe?”

Feuilly gave his name, rank, and serial number. He recalled Bim’s public school French with its round vowels, and then the last, desperate command to bail out before the torrent of unintelligble English, and then added, in a start of confused grief, “But I’m a friend of the ABC. Call me Feuilly. Everyone did.”

The voice was nearing. “Right. I’m Jean Prouvaire. I’m a friend.”

“Of the ABC?” asked Feuilly.

A pale, melancholic face swam up out of the darkness. Feuilly realized Jean Prouvaire had been climbing a ladder. “Yes, a friend of the ABC. In all meanings and insinuations and interpretations. How badly are you injured?”

“It’s just my....” Feuilly had forgotten the word. He said it in Polish and swung his uninjured left arm up, to gesture at his shoulder. “I’m not sure I can--”

Jean Prouvaire called something down to the darkness below, too quickly for Feuilly to follow.

A clear, silvery voice, with the cadence of a hymn called up, in tones of unexpected authority: “We must move quickly. Calais is still under German control. They saw you fall.”

“We shall catch you if you fall again!” came another woman’s voice, lower, but with a sheen of bright assurance. “We’ve a sheet.”

Feuilly looked down. A white square swam into view, through the smoke.

“Swing this way,” said Jean Prouvaire, reaching out a hand. “I can’t quite reach the strings.”

Feuilly did his best. Jean Prouvaire was surprisingly strong. He was as small and slight as Bim was-- had been, Feuilly supposed-- with a shock of untidy hair darker than the shattered sky above, with strikingly unusual features.

“My mother’s from French Indochina,” said Jean Prouvaire, with a sigh.

“I’m sorry,” said Feuilly, awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to stare.”

“It’s alright,” said Jean Prouvaire, taking the knife out of the top of Feuilly’s boot. “But you should know-- we’re rather a motley collection of the French colonial legacy. Chief, center and guide are the only... well, strike that from the book. We are all of us fully French. The Resistance just put in command the ones that most look it. Joly’s from Algeria, Bahorel from New Caledonia, and Bossuet from Quebec. The province, not the city. He’s First Nations. Don’t be too alarmed.”

“I wouldn’t be,” said Feuilly, a little offended. “I have no country any longer. I am made a citizen of the world. All men are my brothers.”  

Jean looked surprised but pleased. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“It was more the fact that you are cutting the strings of my parachute than anything... anything else.”

This made Jean cheerful, or as cheerful as he could be, which was a sort of exalted melancholy. “Alright,” he said. “Last string.”

“We’ve got you, don’t worry!” came the warmer woman’s voice.

This fall was less terrifying and far less precipitous. He had bounced off the sheet before he’d had time to reconcile himself to falling again, and had tumbled gently to the earth before he could think to make a sound. He got stumblingly to his feet, whipping his head around, trying to make sense out of the different shades of darkness about him. Two women and three men were assembled. A lithe blonde gave a quick nod and, pulling her red scarf up over the lower half of her face and moving to the mouth of the alley, said, in the silvery voice of command from earlier: “Bahorel, stay with the ladder. Combeferre, to the street. Courfeyrac and Joly, to the officer. Bossuet, the sheet.”

A rather incongruous figure took over: a fashionable Parisian with a pencil skirt and a submachine gun, the light, citrusy scent of her expensive perfume blending with unexpected harmony with the scent of smoke and gunpowder. She held out a red manicured hand in both welcome and assistance. “I’m Courfeyrac, no first name and no participle,” she said, levering him up with the deft and tactful assistance one generally wields towards the drunk. Her red-brown hair had earlier been pinned into victory rolls, under a hat that had apparently been an early victim to the air raid, but was now falling loose about her face.

“Yes, hallo,” said Feuilly, a little dazzled by her red-lipsticked smile. “Feuilly.”

“The RAF gives their pilots stranger and stranger nicknames,” she said. She tilted her head to the side, to look critically at his shoulder.

“He’ll need a sling,” said a person Feuilly assumed was Joly. Joly was of middle height and limped a little, but moved with an almost anxious energy.

Courfeyrac unknotted the Hermes scarf about her throat. “Will this do?”

“Perfectly.”

Joly said, kindly, “This is just a temporary measure. I can’t fix you up here-- and I need Combeferre’s help, but he’s the only one with a reason to be out on the street. Alright, this will hurt a little.”

It hurt quite a lot. Feuilly was white-faced and trembling as Joly knotted the ends of Courfeyrac’s Hermes scarf around Feuilly’s shoulder.

“There,” said Joly. “I can maybe give you some morphia when we get you--”

He stopped abruptly; Feuilly looked wildly around and saw that Enjolras had raised one slender gloved hand. Everyone melted quietly into the shadows of the alley. Enjolras remained in the mouth of the alley, the spill of light from the street outlining her like saints were, in medieval triptychs.

Courfeyrac slid away from Feuilly and the resounding explosion of light and sound from a hit Luftwaffe bomber revealed her to Enjolras’s right, hair gleaming like captured flame. To Enjolras’s left was the previously unseen Combeferre, a tall, brown-haired man with a pistol and a submachine gun, as well. He pulled a green scarf up from where it had been tucked into the V of his sweater, and pulled it up over his mouth and nose. As if synchronized, he and Courfeyrac angled themselves outwards, like the triptych opening.

Enjolras waited only for the rising whine of the Luftwaffe bomber nearing earth to drown out the inescapable sound of gunfire and the air raid siren. She bent her uplifted hand at the wrist, pointing forward, at the street. Courfeyrac and Combeferre went out first, guns raised.

“I’ve taken her disguise,” said Feuilly, a little foolishly.

“It’s alright,” said an incredibly large and burly man, hooking Feuilly’s good arm around his shoulders. “Courfeyrac would give you the shirt off her back if you’d needed it, and say something unprintable but hilarious while doing so. I’m Bahorel. I can carry you if you can’t walk.”

“It’s only the shoulder--” But Bahorel was rushing him out and onwards, before Feuilly could even finish the sentence. Disoriented from the colored void of the cloudless night in which he had been suspended, and feeling as if the benzdrine was the only thing coursing through his veins, he did not know for how long they ran, or in which direction they headed.

There was gunfire suspiciously close behind them; Feuilly reached automatically for the button on his steering wheel that would fire the machine guns.

Enjolras’s gloved hand rose upward and pointed left; they all swerved into a twisting side street, save for Joly and another man-- Feuilly thought it might be Bossuet-- who ran onward.

Feuilly clasped his gloved hand over his mouth, as Bahorel flung a tattooed arm out in front of him, to keep him in the shadows. The uneven brick of the wall bit into his back and legs. Feuilly squeezed his eyes shut. It was a childish, foolish impulse-- if I can’t see them, they can’t see me-- but by the time he worked up the nerve to open his eyes again, the sound of boots and German shouts had faded to the level of machine gun fire and the high drone of Luftwaffe and RAF planes overhead.

He asked, in a scarcely audible whisper, “Are the others...?”

Bahorel looked at him warningly, and leaned his head towards the main road. A small detachment of men in some kind of Nazi uniform were lingering, guns uplifted, turning in careful semi-circles.

 _They’re looking for me_ , thought Feuilly. He wanted to be sick. The history of his people had always been one of constant flight-- it had amused him to make this literal by choosing to go out of the orphanage into a training course in aeroplane maintenance-- but he had never seen so close the proof that there were people in the world who hated him so much in principle that they would shoot him in policy. Abstractly, he had always known this. Pogroms had been ongoing for centuries, and it hadn’t taken Nazis for his parents to be killed for being Jewish, and for all the comfort of his religion and his community to be torn away from him. At least, he thought, they might kill me for being in the RAF instead of being Jewish. That will make a nice change to the family history.

Quite suddenly, the Nazis were obscured from sight by-- was that a sheet?

Enjolras, Courfeyrac, and Combeferre wielded their weapons with a stunningly swift ferocity. They did not shoot, perhaps fearing the noise would attract more attention, but with the butt of their guns, knocked out the four Nazis before any of the Nazis really understood they were suddenly under a sheet.

“Quickly now,” said Enjolras.

Bahorel more or less swept Feuilly off his feet while turning him.

Feuilly looked up and behind him. Joly and Bossuet, grinning, disappeared from the window of the building behind which the other Friends of the ABC had sheltered.

“Not far now,” said Jean Prouvaire, encouragingly.

Feuilly was glad of this. He could feel the benzedrine wearing off. It had valiantly bolstered him through the last of his first fifteen hour shift, like a life vest in the Channel, but it was now over twenty hours since he had rushed from the hut onto the airfield. They came to another stop. He knew what to do now. He pressed his back into one of the walls of the alley and looked upwards. In the corner of his eye he could see clouds drifting in. They lit up lurid red, like the prefigurement of lightning. A Spitfire darted out in a high whine of protest, black smoke leaking from its wings. Feuilly wondered if it was Leafy or Haybag, or one of his own comrades from Poland, integrated unwillingly, but needfully into the RAF. A squadron of four Luftwaffe planes followed after, sparks flashing from their wings.

Feuilly found himself between Bahorel and Enjolras. Enjolras pointed to the left and Bahorel turned to scan the streets. Enjolras watched the sky.

It had seemed to Feuilly no more strange than falling from the sky to find a female leader of a Resistance cell, but it now occurred to him how extraordinary this was. Everyone, even the burly Bahorel, obeyed the slightest twitch of her fingertips. He glanced askance at her.

“And so we have replaced the dragon,” said Enjolras. The unpredictable and sporadic flashes of light revealed her slightly unearthly beauty, picking out here and there the slash of her cheekbone, a glint of golden hair worn cropped to her shoulders, a piercingly blue eye, a grimly set mouth, unadorned by lipstick, the shadow of her beret, the deep crimson of the scarf at her throat. She seemed then, to notice Feuilly’s gaze on her. “Courage, citizen,” she said. “We have made progress, we have mastered and harnessed the fire which Prometheus once stole for us. Our allies hold the sea and take back the air. We shall return you to England, and thereafter, Poland. Your home shall be your own again.”

The Spitfire soared creaking upward, whining with the strain. Enjolras dropped her eyes and examined the streets, as critically as a naval officer before a doubtful stretch of sea.

There came a snatch of song, in a clear tenor: “If Caesar had given me glory and war, and obliged me to leave my mother--”

“All clear,” translated Jean Prouvaire, in a whisper.

Feuilly was quickly ushered into the open back door of a cafe. Combeferre was watching the door, submachine gun hidden, his hand idly in his pocket (and probably around his pistol). Bahorel was now more-or-less dragging him; the benzedrine was fizzling fitfully in Feuilly’s brain and veins, trying to supply him with some last reserve of energy, but it was a losing battle. Feuilly watched dully as the hallway passed, as he was led into a spacious backroom, the cafe tables pushed to the walls, and chairs clustered close before a fire. On several of the tables were preparations for a meal that had been evidently interrupted by the aerial engagement above. Courfeyrac, dropping into a chair at the table nearest the fire, greeted them all with a, “Whew! The milk hasn’t yet gone off. Coffee, anyone?”

“The benzedrine must be wearing off for you,” said Joly, slipping in, panting a little.

“Yes,” Feuilly admitted, as Bahorel eased him into a chair.

Jean Prouvaire and Combeferre came in last, shutting the door behind them. Feuilly took another careful look around the room. There were boxes of guns and ammunition half-hidden under the tables, a two-way radio in the far right corner, and a map of the North of France and the Channel pinned to the wall. Next to it was a much tattered French flag.

“We brought it with us, out of Paris,” said Joly, noticing the line of Feuilly’s gaze.

“We intend to take it back in, when we’ve the chance,” said Courfeyrac, pouring out coffee. “Feuilly, what do you take in your coffee? Sugar, milk, brandy?”

“Yes-- all of them please.”

The bald one-- Bossuet, thought Feuilly, though people were calling him Eagle-- was dragging out from under a table a little camp bed. He wasn’t having any luck pulling it apart and setting it up.

“Would you like me to help?” asked Feuilly, staggering towards him. “I was a mechanic, before the war.”

“Ah,” said Bossuet, with a grin, “then this would be a waste of your time. This is hardly mechanical at all. It’s horribly primitive.”

“We’re very lucky to have a bed at all here,” said Combeferre. He was sitting now, rummaging through a black medical bag, and laying things out on a cafe table.

“I don’t believe in good luck, at this point,” said Bossuet, struggling mightily with the bed. “Only bad. It’s all I ever experience.”

Courfeyrac appeared at his elbow with the coffee. “Here you are.”

“Let’s get your shoulder set before you eat anything,” said Combeferre. He had missed it before, but Combeferre had a Red Cross arm band tied around the upper arm of his blazer. “We don’t want you to be sick while we’re fixing this for you, and we’re out of morphia. Unfortunately, we’ve no way of getting more-- the Red Cross scarcely has enough as it is.”

Feuilly drank a cup of what was most brandy with a splash of coffee, with a grimace against the bitterness of both the aftertaste of alcohol, and the knowledge that this was _really_ going to hurt. He sat down. He squeezed his eyes closed.

“Joly, to me,” said Combeferre. “This should pop right back in if we get it right. Feuilly, are you ready?”

Feuilly nodded and held his breath.

“One, two, three--”

It was excruciating. Feuilly couldn’t help but cry out a little and for some moments experienced everything in a white haze of pain so intense it seemed the only real thing in the world. This ebbed away by degrees and eventually he found himself well enough to take stock once again. He was on the camp bed by the fire. His shoulder ached but he could move his arm without as much pain as before. He had never been more tired, or more hungry in his life.

The Friends of the ABC were moving about the room in bright and busy little knots. Combeferre and Jean Prouvaire, with plates balanced on their knees, were sitting nearest him.

“I thought you’d be out after that,” said Combeferre, setting his plate to the side. “You alright? How’s the pain?”

“Fine,” said Feuilly. He scanned the room and realized that Enjolras was not in it. Had she even come in? He struggled to sit up.

Jean Prouvaire sprang to his side and gently guided him upright.

“I don’t see-- is your leader alright? Was she captured?”

“Enjolras?” asked Jean Prouvaire, almost as if puzzled by the idea that Enjolras would ever be so careless as to be captured. “Yes, of course. She’s perfectly fine. She’s making sure all’s well with the proprietor of this cafe and checking on our supplies. We haven’t many bullets left.”

The trick with the bedsheet began to make more sense.  

“We’ve been promised some, as soon as the Gestapo stops searching this street for a secret cell of Resistance fighters,” said Combeferre, with a quirk of a smile. “If you’re not tired, you must at least be hungry. Let me get you a plate.”

Combeferre was called away to come help fix the radio, so Courfeyrac brought over his plate. Feuilly tried his best to eat without using his shoulder too much. He hadn’t known how much he used his shoulders until he was trying his damndest not to use them at all.

“Bossuet said you were a mechanic, before the war?” she asked.

Feuilly thought it might now be an unpleasant re-hash of his experiences in the RAF huts, but Courfeyrac did not seem to want to know his CV-- merely if he was alright, and what interested him, as a person, and what they could do for him. He answered her more easily than he had the RAF officers.

“Goodness, I’m impressed.” She picked up a packet of cigarettes on the table, took one out, and light it. She blew out a thin stream of smoke. “Do you know anything about radios?”

“Yes. Do you need help with yours?” He tried not to sound eager at the idea of work he knew he could do.

Courfeyrac elegantly flicked the ash on the end of her cigarette into an empty whiskey glass, looking thoughtful. “It _mostly_ works. Combeferre is interested in anything he can take apart and put together-- radios and people alike-- but it takes us forever to find the right channel. Once you’ve slept a little, perhaps we might prevail upon you to take a look?”

“Thanks,” said Feuilly, almost fervently.

“We ought to be thanking you,” said Joly. He had picked up a gold-knobbed cane somewhere, and moved in such a way that one almost didn’t notice the limp.

“Got it at Dunkirk,” Joly explained, with a rueful smile. He lowered himself into a chair and dragged over a bulky box, full of wire. Feuilly expected him to prop up his knee, but instead he rolled up his trousers and started attaching the wires to his knee. “Held the line while the British evacuated. At great cost to my knee. I’ve been tinkering with it ever since, but I can’t _quite_ restore the degree of flexion I know I can get out of it.”

“I smoke, Bahorel does crosswords, and Joly tinkers endlessly with his knee,” said Courfeyrac, taking another cigarette out of the pack. “Everyone needs a hobby. But don’t let his modesty fool you-- you and he and Eagle over there are brothers of a sort already. Jolllly and Bossuet were in the French air force, but their plane was shot down before they could make it over the Channel and be evacuated. We’re very glad of them; we’ve always managed to save and send home the RAF pilots we’ve been ordered to retrieve thanks to their knowledge of planes and parachutes.” Courfeyrac peered at the wires Joly was conscientiously using to map out the shattered landscape of his knee. “Do you _really_ think electrical treatments are going to work any more than those magnets last week?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” said Joly, patiently, “but that’s why one must experiment. I did have a couple of years in the medical school.”

“You didn’t stay?” asked Feuilly.

“Bossuet over there quit school and enlisted, so I wanted to, too.”

“Were you... all students?”

“Most,” said Courfeyrac, trying to pin her curls back into some semblance of order. “Combeferre was finishing up his internship at Necker Hospital when war broke out. Enjolras was studying to be a teacher, if you can believe it. I wasn’t. I was working.”

“In a fashion house,” explained Joly, at Feuilly’s mystified look.

Feuilly struggled to think of the name of a fashion house. “Not... not Chanel?”

“Darling!” cried Courfeyarc, quite shocked. “Whatever must you think of me! Madeleine Vionnet! _Not_ Chanel. She’s a vicious anti-Semite. I boycott the little black dress. It’s the same color as her soul, or whatever she has left of one.” Courfeyrac looked dreamily at the ceiling. “Give me a bias-cut silk any day. So much more elegant. The work that goes into it is so well rewarded. Vionnet knew how to drape in a way I’d thought lost when the ancient Greek city-states fell to Alexander the Great. But she had to close up shop in ‘39 and here we are. My style guru these days is less Madeleine Vionnet and more Constance Markievicz: a short skirt, stout boots, and a revolver.”

“Bahorel was boxing professionally, I think,” said Joly. “It’s unclear. He gives a different answer every time you ask him. I know Jean wasn’t in school-- he was writing poetry.”

“He speaks all those languages,” said Feuilly, amazed.

“Yes, he’s rather a remarkable autodictat,” agreed Joly, grinning. “So is Combeferre.”

“So are we all, really,” said Courfeyrac. “I didn’t know how to shoot at _all_ until ‘39. We all learn on the job.”

This was an encouraging ethos.  

A subtle shift came over the room. Feuilly looked at first towards where Combeferre, Bahorel, Bossuet, and Jean Prouvaire were doing battle with the radio, but they were all looking at the doorway.

Enjolras appeared in it, her clear blue gaze sweeping the room.

“We haven’t yet reported in,” said Combeferre, before she could do more than look her question. “But we’ve set Feuilly’s shoulder.”

Enjolras inclined her golden head once and moved aside. A rather unkempt man followed her in, clutching a satchel.

“Milk delivery!” he said.

“Our black market supplier, Grantaire,” said Joly, sotto voce.

Combeferre and Courfeyrac rose and went over at once. There was a brief, and quiet conference at the door, then Enjolras inclined her head again, a swift and economical gesture. She moved with a kind of understated grace towards Feuilly-- not as if she had been trained to move in a dance or deportment class, but as if she exercised an unusual and unshakeable control over herself.

“Feuilly,” she said, with an unexpectedly charming smile, “we are glad to have found you. You are, I hope, as well as can be expected?”

“Yes,” said Feuilly, feeling as if he’d probably have said yes even if his arm had fallen off entirely and he was bleeding out.

“We shall have to wait at least a day or two before taking you back to the Channel. It will be our very great privilege to host you until then.”

Feuilly glanced, startled, around the room. Everyone was watching Enjolras, but broke their gaze to turn and smile at him when he made eye contact. Grantaire alone did not, but the way he was staring at Enjolras was not the gaze of the French armies on Joan of Arc, like the others, but of Actaeon watching Diana walk resolute through the moon-dappled olive groves of ancient Greece.

Enjolras genuinely did not seem to notice how the attention of the room crystallized around her, instead taking the silent awareness and immediate obedience to her orders as a tribute to the uniqueness of her Resistance cell. She talked a little, of how they came to be thrown together after the British army withdrew, praising, in passing, each of the members of her cell for their gifts and their skills. When she talked of her friends a sort of warmth suffused her voice. Feuilly could not help but respond to this. He offered at once to be of help with the radio, and treasured Enjolras’s thanks, Combeferre’s eager questions, and Courfeyrac’s effusions more than he thought he would.

“You’ve won over chief, guide, and center,” said Jean, with an encouraging smile. “Where they lead, the rest of us follow. But they tell me you are something of an artist?”

Feuilly glanced at the bit of paper he had covered with doodles and diagrams while trying to see how the radio fit back together. “A little. An untrained one.”

“That is the best kind,” said Jean, eagerly, and launched into what seemed a prepared statement of surrealist principles. It was fascinating and, for a surrealist product, lucid and relatively easy to follow. Feuilly drank it in like a plant after a drought.

Bahorel chuckled. “Now you’ll never get him to stop.”

“I don’t wish him too,” said Feuilly, meaning it fervently. He did not wish for any of it to stop. He was comfortable, at home in a way he hadn’t been since Poland had been lost.

Combeferre laughed outright. “I’m glad we have two days with you. I wish the RAF could give us longer-- we sorely need someone like you.”

“Thank you,” said Feuilly. Two days, he later felt, had not been enough. He was allowed to be useful, and more than that, he was encouraged and required to be so. There was a spirit of almost thoughtless goodwill and generosity. The rest of the world would be unkind, the Friends seemed to agree, so they would not. They adopted Feuilly as one of their own, before Feuilly could even have asked for it. He had felt as if he had been given a passport once again. He was no longer a citizen of nowhere, but a Friend of the ABC. He had people to claim him and look after him, people who treated him with a spirit of generosity and equality and said they would miss him when he went.

He genuinely regretted being smuggled back to England. Chief, guide, and center made the final delivery. The Nazis had not yet learnt to be suspicious of a blonde and a red-head taking what seemed on the surface like a romantic stroll with their sweethearts in the Red Cross. (Via Grantaire, Feuilly had exchanged his RAF uniform for civvies and a Red Cross armband.)

It seemed sacrilege to offer his arm to Enjolras, and, anyways, she had both her hands in the pockets of her trenchcoat. Feuilly suspected she was holding in gun in at least one of the pockets.

“I wish,” said Feuilly, and stared at Combeferre and Courfeyrac before him. Courfeyrac, in a bias-cut walking gown of patterned _crepe de chine_ , was flirting outrageously; Combeferre was listening, amused, but not much moved.

“Yes?” asked Enjolras.

To have her full and concentrated attention was somewhat terrifying. Her eyes were the same, piercing blue of the sky above the clouds.

“I... it is necessary, what I do,” said Feuilly, stumbling, “but it... they do their best, but they make us feel that we are Polish and that Poland no longer exists. And Poland always let me know that I was not Polish. I was a Jew. I couldn't be a citizen.” He was feeling uncomfortable with the disloyalty of the statement. His French grew more formal. “We have been defeated and we have been given a chance to fight back on sufferance. Our place is... is as an unwanted guest. Here, I have been made to feel welcome.”

“You are welcome. And needed.” Enjolras regarded him thoughtfully and said, in a carefully neutral voice, “My parents both died in the evacuation of Paris. My childhood home was requisitioned by the Gestapo. My country was taken from me. I know what it is to feel as if you have been torn out by the roots.”

“To have no place you feel you belong,” said Feuilly, softly.

Enjolras did not nod. Perhaps she thought it would be a waste of energy. But she kept her concentrated, level gaze on him and looked as if she understood. She said, with quiet authority, “A country is more than just a place. It is its people, it is its values. I surround myself with my friends-- my family forged in battle-- and I know, by their efforts and by their actions, that France will not forever be a captive. She is not the Vichy regime. She is hiding in the marshes and woods of the North; she is hiding in backrooms and unmarked houses in every major city. The Nazis may have taken the family of my birth, but when I went to rejoin France, she gave me a sister and five brothers.” She raised two fingers, like a benediction. (Though it was in reality, a signal; Courfeyrac and Combeferre strolled down towards the beach, with attitudes of more forced gaiety than before, and towards a fishing boat with no fish in it.) Enjolras turned again to look at Feuilly. “Now she has given me a sixth.”

“Thank you,” said Feuilly, when he could speak.

As soon as Feuilly was back in England, he wished to be back in France. Pilots could not yet be spared, but when the Luftwaffe was driven from London, and Hitler put permanently on hold his plan to invade England, Feuilly sprang from his seat in the hut and ran, not to his plane, though his feet tried to guide him there, but to the Squadron Leader, asking to be reassigned. It took some doing, to be moved from flying to reconnaissance work, and he was at first convinced they only let him because the RAF wanted to deal with fewer Polish pilots than they had. But the Friends of the ABC had claimed him, and there was a great need in the North of France for anyone they could get. Feuilly had always and ever gone where he was needed; the top brass allowed him to parachute to coordinates only revealed to Feuilly and the pilot while they were aloft and already flying.

This descent was easier and smoother. He landed softly in a barley field, his parachute trailing gently after him like the train of one of Courfeyrac’s bias-cut silk evening gowns.

“Hallo again,” said Jean Prouvaire, coming up out of the darkness, holding a lantern. The others were behind him, clustered around a milk truck Grantaire had been using to make his black market deliveries. “We hadn’t expected it, but we are glad to see you.”

“I am glad to be here,” said Feuilly, with warmth.

“Yes, the Battle for Britain is won,” said Bahorel, leaning out of the cab. “The Battle for France may be renewed.”

It was more than that, but Feuilly did not know how to say it.

It was Enjolras, of course, who immediately understood. Her bright blue gaze drove away the last black clouds of doubt and fear. She clasped his hand and said, smilingly, “Brother, welcome home.”

**Author's Note:**

> I am not actually sure if the RAF ever integrated the Polish pilots into regular divisions, instead of having Polish squadrons with a British Squadron Leader, but as I wanted to increase Feuilly's sense of alienation, he'd just been shoehorned into an otherwise British RAF squadron. Lieutenant Bim Taylor is making a sneaky cameo from _The Charioteer_ , my absolute favorite piece of World War II fiction. He only shows up for like, ten pages, and then gets only alluded to thereafter, but he steals whatever scene he's even mentioned in. 
> 
> The title is from Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again." The sketches mentioned are here: http://irenydraws.tumblr.com/post/140008458788/this-is-forever-ago-but-more-from-that-les-mis 
> 
> And here http://irenydraws.tumblr.com/post/41063792922/aaaa-im-really-loving-the-wwii-french-resistance
> 
> I'm sure I'm forgetting to credit something-- drop me a note in the comments if I have, and I'll happily add it to these notes.


End file.
